Common Sense Breaks Out at City Hall

The city’s last-minute decision not to evict the Occupy Wall Street hordes from Zuccotti Park, at least for now, represents a rare sensible decision by the Bloomberg administration in its reaction to the protest. If the Mayor had gone ahead and sent the N.Y.P.D. in to clear out the square, supposedly for a cleaning, the police would have had to arrest thousands of people live on television, which would have been a public-relations disaster for Bloomberg and for the city.

In stepping back, Bloomberg and Ray Kelly, the police chief, have given themselves some time to seek an agreement with the demonstrators. Even if these negotiations fail, as they may well do, the city will have given the impression that it tried to act reasonably rather than simply trying to bash the protestors into submission.

Spare me the official line that Brookfield Properties, the owner of the “public private” park, had second thoughts about asking for the N.Y.P.D.’s help in cleaning it up. The mayor, whose girlfriend Diana Taylor is a director of Brookfield, is driving this van, and Kelly is in the passenger seat.

Bloomberg’s distaste for what is happening has been clear from the beginning. That’s hardly surprising. The Occupy Wall Street folk have put him in the invidious position of overseeing a protest against the industry that created his fortune and, by extension, his mayoralty. But disliking a protest is one thing. Ordering the police to break it up at dawn, with force if necessary, would have placed in jeopardy his entire political identity as a cool-headed problem solver. If he hadn’t been careful, he could easily have ended up looking like an out-of-touch billionaire trying to defend his own class-interest.

In his radio show this morning, Bloomberg was clearly trying to strike an equitable and impartial note. “The protestors, in all fairness, have been very peaceful there,” he said. But he then went on to cite the concerns of the people living in the neighborhood of Zuccotti Park, adding, “The longer this goes on, the worse it is for our economy.”

If the Mayor is in a tricky spot, so are the protest organizers. After a month in which they have succeeded beyond any expectations, the protesters now have to ask themselves some tricky questions. Is Occupy Wall Street a movement about occupying a piece of real estate in lower Manhattan, or is it about something broader? The answer is clearly that it is about something broader—rising inequality and a corrupted political system—but how should this campaign be prosecuted from here on out?

There isn’t an immediately obvious answer. But over the next few days, somebody is going to have to come up with one and persuade the rest of the movement to go along with it.